Art News: Paris Photo 2026 at the Grand Palais, Dates, Galleries and What to See

Paris Photo, the leading international fair for photography, returns to the Grand Palais from Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 November for its 29th edition. This year it brings together more than 240 galleries and publishers from 38 countries, and it falls in the bicentenary of photography: two hundred years since Nicéphore Niépce fixed the view from an upstairs window of his house at Le Gras, in Burgundy.

Paris Photo 2026 dates and opening hours

• Wednesday 11 November: preview, by invitation only
• Thursday 12 to Saturday 14 November: 1pm to 8pm
• Sunday 15 November: 1pm to 7pm

Tickets are sold through the fair's own website.

Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826 or 1827, the earliest surviving photograph made in a camera, in Helmut Gernsheim's enhanced reproduction of about 1952. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Thomas Ruff retrospective in the nave

The centrepiece is a 36-metre retrospective of Thomas Ruff in the middle of the nave, hung with five of his galleries: David Zwirner, Konrad Fischer, MAI 36, Lia Rumma and Sprüth Magers. It covers more than four decades, from the passport-style portraits he enlarged to two metres to his pixelated jpegs. Ruff studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, alongside Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, the photographers known together as the Düsseldorf School.

Two hundred years of photography

The bicentenary runs through the fair. Hans P. Kraus Jr. of New York brings the earliest processes, with daguerreotypes, calotypes and photograms by Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins and Hippolyte Fizeau. The photogram, made by laying objects straight onto light-sensitive paper without a camera, was taken up again in the 1920s by Man Ray, who called his rayographs, and by László Moholy-Nagy.

László Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm, 1922. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Centre Pompidou brings Revealing, more than 100 works by nearly 30 artists from its photography collection of over 40,000 prints and 60,000 negatives, which takes in Man Ray and Brassaï. Curated by Florian Ebner and Damarice Amao with Julie Jones, it is arranged in four parts: Making the Image, To Infinity, The Studio and Identities. The Prix Pictet shows work by Valérie Belin and Alfredo Jaar, and Elles × Paris Photo returns with a trail through the work of women photographers, this year called An Oceanic Beginning.

The galleries to see

About 150 galleries are in the main sector. For the classic names, start with the Americans. Fraenkel of San Francisco represents Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Irving Penn, Richard Misrach, Hiroshi Sugimoto and the British photographer Richard Learoyd. Howard Greenberg's list in New York runs from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Imogen Cunningham to Edward Burtynsky. Pace's includes Robert Frank and Chuck Close, and Yancey Richardson represents Zanele Muholi, Sebastião Salgado and Mickalene Thomas. Jackson Fine Art of Atlanta represents Sally Mann, and its list also takes in Ansel Adams, Francesca Woodman, Nick Brandt and Massimo Vitali.

Magnum's Paris gallery speaks for the agency Cartier-Bresson founded in 1947 with Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, whose photographers have included Elliott Erwitt and Martin Parr.

For fashion, Staley-Wise of New York handles Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Horst P. Horst, Norman Parkinson, Ellen von Unwerth and Peter Beard. Hamiltons, one of eleven London galleries in the main sector, shows Avedon, Newton and Penn too, along with Annie Leibovitz and Don McCullin, and Michael Hoppen's list includes Bill Brandt.

Among the contemporary galleries, Sprüth Magers represents Ruff and Gursky as well as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, John Baldessari, Fischli & Weiss and Gilbert & George. Sherman and Kruger emerged in New York with the Pictures Generation, alongside Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Robert Longo. David Zwirner represents Wolfgang Tillmans and William Eggleston, and Arbus as well.

The book fair

Nearly 50 publishers fill the Book sector, among them Aperture, MACK, Loose Joints, Stanley/Barker and delpire & co, which carries the name of Robert Delpire, the Paris publisher who first brought out Robert Frank's The Americans, as Les Américains, in 1958. Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations of 1963 helped make the photobook an artist's form, and books are collected now as seriously as prints. The Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards are presented at the fair.

What decides the value of a photograph

Paris Photo is where the photography market takes its bearings for the year, and the auction houses have long timed their Paris photography sales to the same week. Our review of the photography market in 2026 covers the year so far.

Two things matter more than the image. The first is when the print was made. With Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank, a print made close to the date of the negative is worth many times a later print of the same picture, and Bill Brandt went back to his negatives decades later and printed them in far harder contrast, so two Brandts of one image can be different objects. The second is the edition. Contemporary photographers such as Gursky, Sugimoto and Jeff Wall work in small numbered editions, and the edition number, the size and the condition of the print all count.

The same rules apply to the British photographs most often found in collections here, from the sixties portraits of David Bailey and Terry O'Neill to McCullin's war pictures: a print signed by the photographer is a different thing from a later estate print. Painters' photographs have their own collectors too, from Andy Warhol's Polaroids to David Hockney's photographic collages of the 1980s.

If you own photographs and are thinking of selling, send us pictures of the print, front and back, for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

Cover: Paris Photo in the nave of the Grand Palais, November 2016. Photo: Frédéric Bisson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.